Shifter.io (Microleaves) Review: Features, Pros and Cons

Shifter.io - formerly known as Microleaves - is one of the oldest proxies’ service providers on the Internet. Shifter is one of the largest proxy networks in the world with a focus on delivering high-quality residential proxies for data-driven marketing. If anonymity in browsing is your number one priority, you might want to consider using Shifter proxy provider.

Shifter has over thirty million residential proxies found in major cities and countries around the world. Shifter's rotating residential proxies come with an impressive backconnect server. This server utilizes a pool of residential proxies IPs that changes every five minutes to connect to a website. The backconnect proxies display unlimited sessions, 99.9 uptime, and an impressive gigabyte speed.

You can also use Datacenters’ dedicated or private servers and shared proxies, however, Shifter only provides dedicated and shared proxies in the US. All backconnect proxies available on Shifter are unmetered. So, your internet connection will not cut off even if you have consumed your allotted bandwidth. Moreover, Shifter also has cheaper pricing plans, which is why it has gained so much popularity in recent times.

Key featues of Shifter.io

Parameter	Feature
IP Type	Residential/ Datacenter
Price Charged	Port
Price Sample	10 Ports – $125 (Monthly)
Pool Of IPs	30+ Million
Proxy Protocol	HTTP(S) and Socks5
IP Rotation	Sticky Session (Time)
Filtering/Targeting	Countries
Authentication	IP Authentication and Username/Password
Speed	Average
Free Trial	No
Refund Policy	3 days
Support	Contact Form, and Detailed FAQ

Soax Proxy Package and Pricing

Shifter offers its residential proxies in two tiers:

Basic Backconnect Proxies
Special Backconnect Proxies

Both plans start at $299/Month and you will get 25 Basic Backconnect Proxies or 10 Special Backconnect Proxies. The price increases depending on the number of proxies assigned. With Dedicated Datacenter Proxies, their pricing starts at $30/month and gives you 10 high-speed US-based private HTTPS shared proxies with unlimited bandwidth and multiple subnets.

Shifter Test Performance on 2022

When it comes to speed, Shifter (Microleaves) residential proxies performed averagely. Even though they never perform better than the other premium residential proxy providers, their performance was not that poor. Their average response time is 4.426s.

We also tested Shifter on Speedtest.net and the result we got was acceptable even though it wasn’t the fastest.

Average Ping: 54ms
Average Download: 48.21 Mbps
Average Upload: 25.92 Mbps

When we gradually increased the number of concurrent connections and put the proxies on a huge load, the number of connection errors significantly increased. After running the same test a few more times, we can confidently say that Shifter has a huge problem with the connection error rate. With search engines such as Google and Yandex, we got many blocks. Shifter proxies are especially heavily blocked with Yandex. With Google, we also got many blocks, which were 503-error (Recaptcha). When we connected to Amazon using this Proxy, we received many 503, 403, and 401 errors and CAPTCHAs confirmations. As a result, we had to increase the Shifter’s package to over a hundred ports to break the Amazon firewall. That was the same case we experienced with Best Buy and eBay. But for Aliexpress, the connection was fairly smooth and straightforward.

Note: We have published a blog about the Best Proxy Provider of 2022 for you, so you can look up and decide which proxy will fit best with your work.

Shifter Pros and Cons

Pros

Largest IP Pool and Location Coverage: With over thirty million residential proxies found in major cities and countries around the world, only two providers have more proxies than Microleaves – Brightdata (Luminati) has over 72 million, and Smartproxy has over 40 million in their pools. This gives Shifter the third position in terms of IP pool size compared to other providers.

Being a leading proxy provider, Their proxies are of the best quality while being a fully trusted proxy selling service. They have been selling proxies since 2012 and have developed an intimate relationship with thousands of customers from all over the world. They provide three different types of proxies on their website which gives their customers a wider range of choices as to which proxies they want to use. They also provide locations in every country in the world for their Geo-Rotating Residential Proxies.

Unlimited Bandwith: All proxies that you buy from Shifter come with Unlimited bandwidth. This means that you do not have to worry about data limits when you're using the proxy.

Microleaves offer Unlimited bandwidth that is the same as Storm Proxies. Aside from the fact that their proxies are unmetered, they are also quite cheap. Their smallest plan costs $124.99 and comes bundled with 10 ports. Proxies can be used separately and will get you connected to a residential IP with the session control of 5 minutes before changing it to another. If you need more session control, I will advise you to check out Bright Data(Luminati).

Money-Back Guarantee: Shifter does not have any option for having a trial period and using the proxy beforehand to check the quality of the proxies. However, we can overcome this by the availability of their refund policy.

Their customer support is also commendable. They have a ticket support system. If you have any queries related to their website or the proxies, you can submit a ticket. Moreover, there is also a live chat option where you can chat with one of their customer support representatives.

Secure Proxies: Shifter has secure protocols like SOCKS5 and HTTPS that encrypt data and the backconnect IPs are highly untraceable as they change often.

The best thing about Shifter is that they provide Residential Proxies. Residential Proxies are the best when it comes to proxy solutions. Residential Proxies are more secure and safer than datacenter proxies. Almost all the residential proxies are rotating proxies. This means that the IP address of your Residential proxy keeps changing after every recurring period, and your IP never stays the same. Despite their higher price point, they are still one of the most used and demanded proxies on the internet.

Cons

Session Control is Limited: Shifter only provides residential proxies that change with time. They do not have high rotating proxies that change IP after every request, you are tied to using an IP for a period of 5 minutes before getting a replacement except if it gets blocked.
A high number of connection errors: On Google, you are going to be solving a lot of captchas for you to be able to use their proxies. You cannot use their proxies on Amazon also until you contact them to activate it for you. Even at that, they will provide you terms and conditions that you must follow or they will deactivate it. This makes Shifter not suitable for scraping data from Google and Amazon. Aside from these two sites, they are functional on other sites.

Conclusion

We would recommend them because of their pricing and their proxies' geographical distribution. However, because of the connection errors, lack of IP rotation by session, you should carefully consider before purchasing Shifter services.

Whether you need residential or datacenter proxies for high-quality results, Shifter.io is a great service – even though we found some of their claims to be not true.

Shifter is also one of the most secure with SOCKS, 5/4, and HTTPS. Even its secure authentication and whitelisting IPs make it highly recommended in the market.

We also post an article about reviewing Myprivateproxy. You can read about it here.

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